When the British started to classify castes for the purpose of colonial administration caste associations were secularized.4

Discrimination against widows

Hindu women traditionally leave their household after marriage and move into the household of their husband. If their husband then dies, this leaves them entirely dependent on his family for sustenance.5

Notes

^Chatterjee, Partha (1993). The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Post-Colonial Histories. New Jersy: Princeton University Press. p. 173. ISBN0691019436. If there was one institution that... centrally and essentially characterized the Indian society as radically different from the Western society, it was the institution of caste.

^"China's New Confucianism: Politics and Everyday Life in a Changing Society" by Daniel A. Bell, p. 186, quote = "From a liberal democratic perspective in other words, the hukou system is the functional equivalent of a caste system that marks a group of people as second-class citizens just because they were unlucky enough to be born in the countryside."